With the clock over That Hill showing 13.49, it had been a full 15 hours since Andy Murray had sent word to his followers via popular early third millennium social networking service Twitter. Though it seemed needlessly overprotective to call the police and report a missing person on the mean streets of SW19 – he was later found in corporeal form on Centre Court – Laura's idly compulsive checking of her phone every few minutes seemed a measure of how quickly for some Twitter has become part of their Wimbledon experience.

Like a host of players at the Championships, Murray has been posting regular updates on his Twitter page, ranging from the minutiae of his routine to a game he has devised in which tennis players' names are conflated with foodstuffs. "John McEnrolo, Cod woodbridge, mardy fishcakes, prawn borg, martina haggis, mince spadea, egg rusedski, spotted dick norman," runs a recent update. "Too good." "Even if it's just something like they've had a pizza or they're playing Playstation," explains Laura, "you just want to know what they're up to."

Do you? It's said you can get an idea of how old someone is by asking them which digit they use to ring a doorbell. Those who automatically use their index finger tend to be older than 25, while those who instinctively use their thumb are younger, steeped more fully in a culture of computer games and texting and the like. For some, sports tweeting divides people in a similar way. Either you regard Murray's mildly wry aperçus about ice baths as really putting you inside the action, or you're able to look back to the Borg-McEnroe final tie break in 1980 and think: now, would that experience really have been enhanced had McEnroe punctuated the build-up with tweets along the lines of "physio this morning. off to play Game&Watch now:-)"?

The bigger a business sport has become down the decades, the more its followers have bemoaned their lack of access to increasingly remote stars. The line from players' managers is that Twitter is changing all that. Whether this is true in any meaningful way other than as a marketing opportunity we shall have to wait and see, but you can't deny it has varied this year's Championships. The aristocracy of tedious Wimbledon obsessions – rain, strawberry prices, queueing – has seen its feathers ruffled by an ambitious arriviste: Twitter. And not altogether encouragingly, those who have genuine access to players have lavished much of that precious time asking them about Twitter.

"I feel like I answer more questions about Twitter now in the press than I do about tennis," tweeted Andy Roddick this week. Chalk up another triumph for sections of the press room, who have never exactly shied from the irrelevant in pursuit of what convention demands we style as "a good news line".

Given the choice of inquiring "why did you keep hitting it to his majestic, neo-Edbergian backhand?" or "have you had a message off Sean Connery?", eight out of 10 hacks seem to prefer the latter.

It's a shame, really, that Tom Daley's diving partner Blake Aldridge didn't tweet midway through the pair's dives at the Beijing Olympics, instead of notoriously using his mobile to phone his mum. Had he opted to broadcast some 140 character banality to the wider world, journalists would no doubt have fancied it was frightfully modern and something which – while in no way really understanding it – they probably ought to find charming.

Indeed, for the duration of this Championships, Her Majesty's Press has filled many of its pages with collated player tweets, suggesting ambitions extend all the way to becoming the paper version of Twitter, a status about as pointful as being the wax tablet version of Grand Theft Auto.

Still, there's a limit to how long one can bang on about newspapers' bovine re-spewing of Wimbledon tweets in a newspaper article about Wimbledon tweets, and given that we appear to have reached it, now seems time to wonder if this isn't just the start of something much more transformative to the game.

After all, a US women's soccer player recently tweeted from the subs' bench during a live game, so it's possible the phenomenon could creep nearer to the action itself.

Serena Williams explained this week that her sister Venus was far too highbrow for such nonsense, but that she herself has 500,000 followers. "Maybe I'll tweet from my chair when I'm playing," she smiled. " 'Gosh, I shouldn't have lost that game!' But I am sure the umpire will probably stop me, thinking I am getting coached."

He might. Then again, he might ask her to check whether Ashton Kutcher has posted another picture of Demi Moore's arse. For tennis Twitterers, it could be a brave new world.